EXiT Talk
Catharine Clark Gallery
November 8, 2025
Melted Away
[NL] Since 2006, we have been working on a body of work called Melted Away in which we create sculptures of words in ice. We have melted down Democracy four times. We melted down the word Economy on the 79th anniversary of the Great Depression during the final week of the 2008 presidential campaign. We melted down The American Dream in 2016 at the conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia. We’ve melted down the Middle Class in 2012 in Charlotte and Tampa, The Future during the Peoples Climate March in New York in 2014. And we’ve melted down Truth in 2018.
[MR] The first sculpture Democracy was in Jim Kempner Fine Art’s garden in New York on the third anniversary of the Iraq War.
[MR] And that came about, because, in 2005 or 2006, we had made a series of mug shots of the Bush administration, called Line Up, of Bush’s cabinet. It was a postcard book that we sold on the streets in Union Square during the Republican Convention in NYC in 2004 and somebody expressed interest in buying a fine edition of it. Not knowing very much about that, I started doing research and getting advice from people.
This was at the time when digital photography was starting to emerge as a medium for fine art. I wasn’t sure whether we should make internegatives and silver prints from them or a digital print. I reached out to print galleries to get advice and met with gallerists and print dealers. When I showed it to Jim, he immediately said, “I’ll publish it.”
[MR] As I turned to leave the gallery, the gallery director Dru Arstark followed after me and asked, “Do you and Nora do garden sculptures?” That seemed a bit strange to ask, since we hadn’t been talking about anything like that and were making videos and installations. We do sculpture, but garden sculptures?
I said “Let me talk to Nora.” That night, while we were having dinner I said, “Nora, Dru asked me if we do garden sculptures.” And Nora said without hesitation, “Yes, let’s do an ice sculpture.”
That’s how it started.
[MR] And then two years later in 2008, we were invited to participate in a project of public art interventions in the Midwest during the presidential campaigns.
Provisions Library, the commissioning organization, invited us. During our initial phone call I asked, “Aren’t both conventions in the Midwest? We’ll melt democracy in both conventional cities.” What I didn’t know was there was only money for one convention. So I blew up the budget and we had to figure out ways to raise additional money. And that became the blueprint for the project Melted Away. We’ve been in three conventions, both Republican and Democratic.
[NL] And other public locations. 7 different ice sculptures in public parks in 10 different cities.
Last Call – DemocracyICED
[NL] To talk a little bit about the ice sculpture project we just came off of in D.C. About two and a half months ago, we got a call from someone saying, “Would you be interested, could we commission you to do something in Washington, D.C.?”
Marshall and I went back and forth about the details. Finally we said, “Sure, we’ll do that.” We proposed to meltdown the word Democracy on October 15th.
It was a huge success, probably the most coverage we ever got with the work. And it was partially, due to, though we want to take all the credit. The truth of the matter is it’s partially due to Ben Cohen, of Ben and Jerry’s who supported the project and provided the infrastructure for us to do it.
[NL] The project happened so quickly alleviating us from getting overly involved in fundraising, which we usually have to do. And we’re not accustomed to working with someone else. When they said, this guy over here is going to be getting your permit and this person over there is going to be doing that. We were a little worried about it coming through.
I’m such a maniac about details and having to be in control. My first reaction was, they’re never going to get a permit. And then I thought well, maybe they will because they’re very influential – we’re not Ben of Ben & Jerry’s. So we did a site visit trip to Washington.
[MR] We saw some locations and they were really keen on us doing it in Lafayette Square and at that point, this is the park across from the White House, there was a peace tent directly in front of the White House. Activists had been at that location, 24/7 for over 20 years nobody lives there. They just occupy the tent. We thought that’s the ideal location but we’d need to move the tent and we couldn’t. But most of all, we knew we would never get Lafayette square as a site. We tried once in 2016. And two weeks later after our site visit Trump got rid of the tent and the peace activists.
[NL] Not because of us, you know.
[MR] We got a call from Cohen’s team that we couldn’t get Lafayette Square. The other place they were suggesting was the House Triangle, which is the.Southeast corner, in front of the Capitol, where you, no doubt, have seen many press conferences, given it’s convenient for elected officials in the Capitol, it’s right outside their work. They can talk for 20 minutes or so and go back into session. But, that wasn’t possible either, because we were going to occupy the space for longer than one hour. And Ben’s people said, oh, well, we’ve got the National Mall. Okay, what a surprise!
[MR] We did the Truth sculpture there in 2018. It was sort of like a dress rehearsal for this. But, because of the government shutdown the National Park Service was mostly closed, except for the Park Rangers that were taking care of the Mall, but we didn’t get the permit from them. And Nora and I were on edge. Nora was really on edge.
We didn’t even have the permit the night before. We’re planning to leave at five in the morning to drive a van down with everything packed in it, all the equipment, the plinth, etc.
We were going to arrive on the mall in the morning at 6 AM without a permit. We were bringing over 3,000 pounds of ice from New York City arriving at 8 AM.
[NL] Plus a plinth that weighed a thousand pounds. You know, activists hold signs up and they can run. We can’t. That’s when I’m getting nervous. And, so we pull up at 6 o’clock in the morning, go to the Mall, nobody’s there. And then suddenly a person comes from the shadows and says, “I got the permit. ”
So we just went to town, set up, and had a huge, press conference. Marshall, you talk about.
[MR] When we were devising the project. We decided that we’d do the sculpture. But we wanted to have a press conference, too. Ed Erikson with whom we were working with from Ben Cohen said, “Make a wish list.” And of course, we did. We wanted Bernie Sanders, A.O.C., Ro Khanna. And on and on. In the end, we got very good speakers.
Reverend Bill Lamar, pastor of the Metropolitan African American Episcopal Church. The Proud Boys had vandalized his Church. The Church took them to court and won a judgment. The Proud Boys defaulted, and the Church went back to court, won the case and were awarded the Proud Boys trademark. Any profits from merchandise the Proud Boys sell goes to them. Directly to them.
Tariq Habash also spoke. He was the first Biden appointee to resign over Gaza. Robert Weissman, the director of Public Citizen and State Senator Nina Turner from Ohio, who was Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign manager, all spoke. It was just a fabulous collection of people to speak referencing the Democracy ice sculpture, speaking very passionately about what’s happening to our country.
[NL] And then Democracy met its final demise.
[MR] One of the outcomes we decided beforehand was of course we were going to do a digital print documenting it like the other sculptures in Melted Away.
And then we realized why not do something like we had done in 2016 with The American Dream Project. We collected the sculpture’s melted waters and bottled them in a small edition called Tears from the American Dream. And so we decided to make a fragrance from the Democracy ice sculpture..
[NL] We’re in the process of prototyping it. It is called Deception. Smells like democracy.
[MR] The back of the box is pretty ironic describing the fragrance with Top, Heart and Base notes. And here we are. Any questions?
Question: I have a question about the ice sculptures. Are they made in a mold? I mean obviously you’re not carving the ice sculptures yourselves.
[NL] No they’re not molded.
Question: Are they made on site or are they trucked in?
[MR] They’re made off site, by ice carvers.
[NL] These ice carvers make a living cutting swans, corporate logos, ice luges and custom ice cubes. The guys that we’ve worked with in Long Island City in New York is Okamoto Studio. What married us to them in the very beginning was that we took a tour of their ice facilities, and when they opened the walk-in freezer, there were ten Buddhas… life sized Buddhas… carved out of ice. They weren’t swans.
We both looked at each other and said “Okay, these are the guys we’ve been looking for.” We’ve been working with them ever since 2006. Interestingly enough, in doing this, Washington democracy, this time I could not find an Ice partner to carve democracy for us.
[CC] Did they object to the word?
[NL] We don’t know. When we do these works and we travel with them, we try to put the money into the local economy and work with the people who live there. And there was no time last October, because it was a really fast turnaround. One guy though just was not very wild about doing it.
He wanted only to do really high profile work. I guess we weren’t high profile enough for him.
[MR] Not high profile enough? We’re reported on in the ABC Evening News, New York Times, The Economist, London Financial Times, thousands of social media posts.
[NL] The other company that I called came in at twice as much as the New York company that we worked with. They were going to drive it down and the owner Shinaro Okamoto was going to come too and install it. We decided, not just in terms of the budget to work with Shintaro.
[MR] When we were in 2012 at the Republican convention in Tampa, which was another difficult site to get. I had the brilliant idea because we’ve never carved a letter on site. To do that at our Lykes Gaslight Park site, which is right across from the Tampa police headquarters.
We had a police liaison and I asked the Ice carver to carve a couple of letters. The carver takes out his chainsaw and begins carving the ice. Our police liaison came running out screaming at me, flailing her arms, screaming, “He has a weapon, he’s got to stop.” I pleaded with her to just give us a few more minutes to finish the letter.
The carver’s wife, also part of the team, was freaking out because she thought her husband would have a heart attack. And that’s just, like, very stressful. And so we learned never to carve letters in public on site, at least not in national security zones like political conventions.
